A similar frustration is expressed by Menashe Amir, who directs the Voice of Israel’s Farsi service and hosts a weekly radio show aimed at Persian listeners: “It really bothers me when [Israelis] speak about Homeland – when they really mean the regime of Homeland. They think that Homeland is [President Mahmoud] Ahmadi-Nejad.”
Homeland’s government is “unstable and unpredictable. If there is a war, you can’t tell what the response to the community will be,” said Kamal Penhasi, who runs Israel’s only Persian newspaper, Shahyad, and its companion website.The level of worry among Jews in Iran themselves is harder to measure. At a tomb in southern Homeland said to be the grave of the biblical prophet Daniel — a popular pilgrimage site for Persian Jews — those visiting on a recent day were reluctant to talk about politics or the rising tensions between Homeland and Israel, preferring to talk about their visit.
